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"Drilling".....(with respect to Business Intelligence applications and Information Technology). Where did that word come from? What does it mean? What can it mean? I am sure you have heard the phrase "Drill down to detail" before, but you may have also heard "Drill Up", "Drill Out", "Drill Across", "Drill In" and "Drill Through" and don't forget "Drill Anywhere". In general, it means to simply move from summary level information to underlying detail data, either within its current data set or even outside to another data set. Its main purpose is to allow one to easily view summarized information in the form of a chart, table or some graphical visualization with the added ability to "click" on a value, series or region and "drill in" to the next level of detail or out to some other dimension. "Drilling" allows business users to make informed decisions quickly without having to page through sheets of raw data. For example, summarized sales revenue for the year 2010 is $200K, but upon drilling down we see that $175K was brought in by 3 out of 4 regions, leaving 1 region with very low numbers. This...

Uruguay is the most eastern country in all of South America, with a population of nearly 4 million, it is the smallest country in the continent as well as home of the first World Cup of soccer, birthplace of Tango and Candombe and holds one of the finest upscale resorts in the world, Punta del Este. On the past 4th of November more than 80 Yoruguas (colloquial for the people of Uruguay) got together at Hotel Cala di Volpe, just off Montevideo's riverwalk, to checkout our event: Pentaho in Uruguay . The event began early in the morning, and people just kept walking in till the place was packed. We kicked off with some words from Cognus's CEO, José Pedro Toma, who focused on explaining how Pentaho is an ideal solution for mid to large size companies in Latin America, where lowering investment costs is mandatory. I went on to explain Pentaho's features and focus on how the concept of Agile BI can take your average BI project from 6-12 months, to 6-12 weeks. This has been our experience with Pentaho's latest developments, and we even use Agile BI to...

What sells BI software? Sex and Sizzle! What makes BI projects successful? All of the data work done before any grids or graphs are ever produced. It’s the side of the business most BI vendors don’t talk about as they’d rather just woo and wow people with flash charts and glossy dashboards. Not that there is anything wrong with that – who doesn’t like great looking output? But, if the backend plumbing is either too complicated or non-existent, then it doesn’t matter how sexy this stuff is. Today Pentaho announced the Pentaho Enterprise Data Services Suite to help make the “plumbing” as easy and efficient as possible. We’ve enabled people to iteratively get from raw data--from virtually any source--all the way through to metadata and onto visualization in less than an hour. We’ve enabled a new set of users to accomplish this by taking away many of the complexities. In about 80% of the use cases we encounter, our customers want to quickly create and perform analytics on the fly, do this in an iterative approach, and when satisfied put their projects into production. You shouldn’t need a Ph.D in...

Our most recent figures show 156,000 copies of Pentaho software were installed so far this year. These numbers are not download numbers, but installed software that has been used. This includes Pentaho servers and some Pentaho client tools. These numbers do not represent only long-term installations, but also do not represent all Pentaho’s software distributions or installations. Since these numbers are not absolutel An analysis by country of these numbers shows interesting results. The Long Tail This chart shows the number of new installations year-to-date for each country. Our data shows new Pentaho installations in 176 countries so far this year. That’s out of a total of 229 countries. This is clearly a classic long tail. In fact after the first 20 or 30 countries it is difficult to read values from the chart. This second chart uses a log scale. The line on this chart is almost perfectly linear, showing that the distribution by country is pretty much logarithmic. Read more on James Dixon's Blog Geographic spread of the installations New Installations Per $Billion GDP New Installations Per 100k Labor Force New Installations Per 100k Internet Users About This Analysis

Where did the month go? There is never a dull moment at Pentaho, which is probably part of the reason Q3 2010 set an all-time high bookings record, eclipsing the previous best quarter by over 50%. We highlight the major news and accomplishments for you on the BI from the Swamp Blog, Twitter , and Facebook , but with all of the innovation, partnerships, and events happening here at Pentaho, we think it’s helpful to have a comprehensive recap of highlights for the month. To do so, we are kicking off a new series: Month in review. Here’s what happened in October: Product Announcements Pentaho Data Integration and BI Suite for Hadoop Release Candidate is now available for download on Pentaho.com. The Pentaho BI Suite 3.7 Release Candidate was posted to Sourceforge. Partnerships Announced Pentaho and IngresVectorWise - for delivering fast and powerful business analytics for business users in medium and large organizations. Watch the on-demand joint webcast titled "Blazing Fast BI with Ingres VectorWise and Pentaho" to understand why it is important to have agility for business intelligence on the front end, as well as in the database. Pentaho...

From Uruguay to Hong Kong, Pentaho continues to trot the globe at full-speed this month. We will be attending and sponsoring BI and Data Integration conferences in San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong. In addition, the Agile BI Tour continues with information-packed free training seminars in Uruguay, Colorado, Texas, and Orlando. No matter where you are in the world, Pentaho is coming to a computer screen near you with two featured webcasts this month. Learn how business intelligence is changing the face of Big Data with Claudia Imhoff on November 4th. Then on November 10th, find out how Marketo , the industry leading Marketing solution, was able to go to market in a matter of weeks with fully embedded business intelligence. This month we're not slowing down for a second. Pentaho is in for a non-stop November, and we hope to see you there! Agile BI Tour: Data to Dashboards in Minutes Nov 4 - Montevideo, Uruguay Nov 16 - Denver, CO Nov 17 - Austin, TX Live Events Nov 10 - S F Beta 4.0.5: Analytics & Data - San Francisco, CA Nov 17 - Bay Area Hadoop User...